Flower Gift E-Commerce Marketing Strategy

According to incomplete statistics, there are now tens of thousands of websites and online stores related to flower reservations and flower delivery in our country, but few of them have achieved outstanding results.

Not long ago, a boss consulted the author about the marketing strategy of flowers. She runs several good flower shops in the local market, with many competitors and extensive industries. She wants to take the e-commerce route, but the flowers are more individualized. They are not standardized products, and delivery is inconvenient. Therefore, they have been skeptical.

My answer: Do it well. If you don't do well, you can't do it. If you think the industry is confusing, competitive, lacking brand-name, and taking these as obstacles, there may be no chance. However, if you think backwards, take the lead in making standards in the confusion, build trustworthy brands, and strengthen user experience with innovative operations, I believe you can embark on the same path as a flower e-commerce business.

We know that Americans have the habit of sending flowers. Every year, the per capita spending on flowers is as much as $3-40, and the flower market is tens of billions of dollars. This creates a good development environment for flower retailers. Originally a flower chain retail store in New York City, the name 1-800-flowers came from the telephone number of the flower. Initially, the company only accepted customer orders and inquiries, and provided advice on what kind of flowers the consumer purchased. For consumer delivery and so on. Later it became the largest online flower and gift sales platform in the United States. How does 1-800-Flowers develop to this day's scale and what marketing tools are worth learning from?

Three steps to complete the transformation first step, physical store chain expansion In 1976, James McCann established his first florist in New York. The company's original name was Flora Plenty, and the florist operated well. Naturally thought of expansion, a few years later, the florist's facade increased to 14 and annual sales reached 50,000 US dollars. At this time, there was a growth bottleneck. McCain understood that increasing the storefront to increase the scale will be limited by factors such as geographical location, traffic, customer traffic, and operating costs. Not only is it slow, but it also has large capital requirements. With the ceiling, with the fierce competition, profit or loss will come sooner or later. So he started planning transformation.

The second step was the transformation of telephone direct sales. At the time, the United States was a relatively developed direct selling industry. Dell, who had been in the first year of college in 1984, had made a fortune because of direct sales of computers. In 1987, McCann acquired a telemarketing company on the verge of bankruptcy, selling flowers through a combination of telemarketing services and retail stores. Later, it purchased another 800 toll free number and set up a call center in New York. Since then, the telephone sales business has grown rapidly and has gradually grown into its revenue growth engine. In 1990, about 70% of the company's revenue came from telephone sales, and 30% of its revenue came from store retail. When they realized that more and more business was achieved through 800 services rather than physical stores, they seized the number 1-800-3569377 (Note: FLOWERS corresponding to the number on the keyboard) , And for the company changed the name now - 1-800-Flowers. Five years later, the company opened a global toll free telephone service in cooperation with AT&T. It provided customers in 130 countries with orders to deliver gifts in the United States. Direct sales of phones made 1-800-Flowers successful.

The key to its core lies in the fact that telephone direct sales have broken through geographical restrictions, expanded contact with customers, reduced operating costs, and achieved control over the entire marketing process and results.

Traditional stores come to buy flowers. When they buy it, they leave. You cannot catch potential customers. Whether you can come back to become repeat customers, one is to see if your service is good or bad, and the other is whether you have fate.

Telephone direct sales directly establishes relationships with customers. The customer sets the order, what is called, who to send to, contact information is how much, the business knows exactly, and then only need to accumulate data and file optimization, use professional technology to record marketing process and results. , you can manage your customers, carry out more targeted marketing activities, provide a variety of value-added services, continue to have relationships with customers, and facilitate the formation of long-term business lock-in.

In particular, 1-800-FLOWERS has professional training programs to provide professional and unified training for marketing staff to ensure the quality of service. In addition, timely communication enables 1-800-FLOWERS managers to be informed and aggregate consumer feedback on the product, monitor all aspects of direct marketing to conduct multiple tests and optimize marketing.

Third, marching into the Internet era In 1992, 1-800-flowers started to collaborate with AOL (AOL) to open up flower sales outlets on AOL's website. After accumulating a certain amount of network management experience and technology, they also Eager to try. In 1995, a variety of newer network technologies coincided with each other. Since then, 1-800-flowers have foreseeable certain things that will surely appear in people's hearts. The Internet will become an efficient sales platform, and they will develop them. Out of your own website. Just as Dell later shifted its marketing focus from the phone to the Internet, they started the mouse + cement sales approach.

After 1997, the company vigorously expanded its Internet sales. The company's name was also changed to 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. In addition, the business scope of online sales extends from flowers to related products such as chocolate and red wine, as it turns out that people tend to buy these gifts along with flowers.

Of course, the previous offline sales and telephone sales have laid the foundation for the 1-800. 1-800-flowers.com has established a brand in the off-line world and later ported this brand to the online world. Although the online world has greatly expanded the market, flowers are different from other commodities, and distribution problems have become their biggest problem.

In order to solve the distribution problem, 1-800-FLOWERS acquired the flower franchise system of Conroy, the largest flower chain retailer in the western United States. Thus, it has 32 direct sales stores and 92 franchise stores nationwide. The wide-ranging physical store solved the delivery difficulties and ensured that the network sales products were delivered in a timely manner. The convenient and quick service quickly won consumer support and reputation.

At the same time, 1-800-flowers.com also has an online *** authorization system, and everything can be easily implemented electronically. This is a very simple thing to do after it is far from the real world and after a telephone transaction.

More importantly, 1-800 strongly highlights the differentiated features and ideas of gifts, and hopes that the novelty ideas will be displayed in front of customers along with the products they send. As a result, after receiving the order, the customers often can not help but germinate the idea of ​​visiting the site.

The creative stunt of Internet marketing I often mentioned that good ideas are low cost. Good ideas must be difficult to think but easy to do, and it's fun to do and leave a lasting impression. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM is very good at creative ideas.

1) Make the website platform more creative Many internet e-commerce companies use their website as an online sales platform to classify products for sale by customer group, product category or price. This is the way we most often see.

However, 1-800-flowers.com, always aiming at "ingenuity and understanding", has always had a good idea.

This year, when Mother's Day is approaching, the company realizes that Mother's Day is the best time to sell flowers. There is a survey data, two-thirds of the $14 billion sales of Mother's Day gifts come from flowers. From this correlation, we can know what a great business opportunity this is.

1-800 realizes that at this point of time, it is not only selling flowers but also front-end-attracting eyeballs. At the same time doing a good job on the back-end - generating word of mouth As a result, the back-end change front-end, the front-end change back-end, and loop diffusion propagation are completed.

To this end, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM puts forward a marketing campaign that focuses on "every mother." They stress that "there are 82.5 million mothers in the United States. We promise that no mother will be ignored," since every mother is different. Therefore, the gift must be different. The activity roughly divided the mother into 8 categories: "Beginning to be a mother", "Gourmet Master", "Pet-Friendly", "DIY", "Enthusiastic and Eco-friendly", "Red Carpet Fashion", and "Forever Busy "" and "Mom's Mommy." 1-800-FLOWERS.COM distinguishes moms in a fun and humorous way and offers gift suggestions for different categories. For example, “loving pet moms” will carefully dress up pets and carry their pets with brush and pet pad. The gift for them is a passionate bouquet, and the bouquet for “Environmentally Friendly Mom” is cleverly and novelly loaded. There are garden tools such as a spatula in the beautiful kit.